Seychelles and BVI licences: what they prove.

TrueBroker is a free broker safety checker, and this page is its register guide for the Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands. Half the brokers on our board quote an offshore licence, and the registers behind them prove less than the licence numbers suggest.

What can the registers confirm?

The Seychelles FSA publishes its licensees by category with entity, trade name, address and website, and the BVI FSC publishes a register of some twelve thousand entities. Both can confirm that a FIRM is licensed. Neither publishes licence numbers.

What can they never confirm?

Because the registers carry no numbers, a claimed licence like SD056 or a SIBA reference cannot be verified against anything public. It stays the firm’s own claim, however official it looks in a footer. When our pipeline verifies these firms, the verdict records the number as unverified for exactly this reason.

What should you do with an offshore broker?

Match the firm name and the website against the register, since that much is checkable
Treat the licence number itself as decoration, not evidence
Weigh what the licence buys you, which the money protection tool spells out: no compensation scheme and a distant court if the money stops moving
Check the firm on the board, where the licence has been checked as far as it can be

THE SHORT VERSION

An offshore register can confirm the firm but never the number, so match the name and domain, discount the number, and price in what the licence does not protect. The full method is in check a broker. The onshore registers answer far more: FCA, CySEC, ASIC and FSCA. Mauritius at least names the firms working without a licence, and we mirror that on the FSC warning list.